Some embroidery

My favourite jeans are falling apart. Frayed cuffs and paint stains and allover worn out. I've had to reduce the waist twice (due to weight loss *g*) and once I repaired the crotch area. A worn crotch on jeans is tricky to fix and it's only possible before there is a hole. I used a fusible (Swedish brand) on two leftover pieces of light silk, sewed them together to match the seam in the jeans' crotch, ironed them on and then sewed back and forth with the grain. It's not elegant, but choose a thread in the right colour and it's almost invisible and it actually works.
But. Once your clothes have reached this stage of falling-apart-edness there's nothing to prevent you from messing around with them. I decided to embroider ladybugs on mine. My youngest son saw them and told his older brother "Mommy's sewing spiders on her pants". I guess I agree, they don't look much like ladybugs, but at leats my jeans are crawling :)

Speaking of embroidery I made a painting with flowers. Inspired by a picture on the 'net I used textile paint to make big blobs of colour with long stalks attached. I then embroidered contours on the stalks with upside down back stitch and flowers in the blobs with single chain stitches and french knots. This project was a lot of fun to make, and I'm very happy with the result.

My paintings are up

My "Vem ska trösta Knyttet"-paintings are finally hanging on the wall. The wall is newly painted, which made me more than commonly nervous about correct placement of the screws - obviously a bad idea to make a mistake - so I measured and drew markings on a paper large enough to cover the entire group of paintings, taped the paper up and screwed through it.
The painting itself was pure fun. The frames... I looked everywhere for frames to match my vision but no... So I finally decided to make my own. I asked Mats at the lumberyard to cut the pieces for me and my husband and I used a router to cut grooves for the paintings. We had to build a support for the router, the diagonally cut corners made it difficult to keep it straight. I stained the pieces before I glued them together.
The corner pieces on my strap clamp are too sharp for the soft wood I used for my frames, they'd mark them. I put strips of thick felt between them and the wood to avoid that problem, but other problems cropped up. I literally had to puzzle the pieces together - they weren't identical and some of them were slightly twisted. In the end I was quite happy with the constellation, though. I used a brush and painted the glue on. Worked very well, hardly any mess.
I knew exactly what I wanted to hang the frames, but what do you call the little metal blecks with "keyholes" in them? I still don't know their name in English, but the fellow at the hardwarestore understood what I meant and fouhd them for me. "Hängbleck" in Swedish. I'll remember for future use! They're screwed on top of a hole - ingenious, really. To prevent the frames from damaging my newly painted wall i put felt pads of the type you put on chair and table legs on the backside.
Now I'm afraid my appetite is whetted and I'll have to make all my own frames from now on. Or at least the ones for my kids in profile...